macOS disk audits should hunt for duplicate tool installs
Reclaiming disk space from a developer macOS laptop
Developers commonly accumulate multiple installs of the same tool that none of the standard cleanup guides flag. Examples seen in one audit: three separate Wine setups (~/.wine, Whisky bottles under ~/Library/Containers, and Wine Stable.app in /Applications) totaling 24+ GB; ~/.cache/uv (Python package mgr) and ~/.cache/winetricks each hoarding 3+ GB silently; stale Ollama models (ollama list shows a modified date — anything untouched for months is dead weight at ~9GB each). brew cleanup --prune=all -s also accumulates 7+ portable-ruby vendor copies from past upgrades (~35MB each) that brew never removes by default.
After the well-known macOS hogs (Trash, Docker VM, ~/Library), enumerate ~/.cache/* and check ollama list for stale models — both are skipped by Storage Settings and most cleanup utilities.